BACKGROUND: Patient age may influence decisions to withhold life-sustaining treatments, independent of patients' preferences for or ability to benefit from such treatments. Controversy exists about the appropriateness of ...

We examine management issues experienced by community physicians providing care to patients they expect to die within a year. In a case series, 61 physicians in northern New England enrolled 182 consecutive dying patients. ...

Modern life-sustaining therapy often succeeds in postponing death but may be ineffective at restoring health. Decisions that influence the time and circumstances of an individual's death are now common and require an ...

The widespread consensus that withholding certain life-sustaining treatments, especially those entailing substantial suffering, is sometimes in a patient's best interest conflicts with our basic instincts when the treatments ...

OBJECTIVE: Would increasing the documentation of advance directives (ADs) lead to a reduction in resource utilization? We examined this question by conducting three secondary analyses: (1) we tested for a change in ...

Modern life-sustaining therapy often succeeds in postponing death but may be ineffective at restoring health. Decisions that influence the time and circumstances of an individual's death are now common and require an ...